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Announcing the first batch of 15 companies selected for @InTech50 2016

InTech50, a flagship event of iSPIRT & Terenne Global, running in its third year, is a platform for showcasing of some of the most promising software products created by entrepreneurs from India.

50 companies are shortlisted every year, by an eminent panel comprising of Chief Information Officers (CIOs) of global companies, VCs, and senior executives from Product companies.

The chosen 50 companies will receive advice, on-going mentoring, product marketing support, and funding to scale their offering to the global markets.

This year, we received over 300 applications. The criteria for the first phase of shortlisting were as follows:

  • Products that were already operating in the market were preferred to those at a concept / POC stage
  • Products that addressed horizontal opportunities were preferred over those that focused very deep on a vertical
  • Products that were easy to implement & use were preferred over products that needed deeper integration with enterprise systems (like ERP)
  • Solutions that could be an “add-on”/”bolt-on” to the existing eco-system

Here is the list of the first batch of 15 companies that are selected for InTech50 2016:

  1. CloudCherry: Cloudcherry is a real-time, Omni-channel customer experience management platform that helps customer-facing brands track, measure & improve Customer Delight – thereby resulting in greater customer loyalty and profitability for the brand.
  2. Drona HQ: a mCaaS – mobile container as a service. It offers mobile app as a container preloaded with various engineering components like SSO, push notification, Security and various other features which can be extended by any 3rd party web app that can be loaded on top of DronaHQ.
  3. FT Cash: ftcash aims to empower micro-merchants, small businesses, retail chains and home based entrepreneurs with the power of mobile payments..
  4. Ideal Analytics: Ideal Analytics provides proactive business suggestions using business rules and advanced statistical & data mining techniques.
  5. Ideapoke: Ideapoke is a B2B software platform, which helps companies to find technology partners, connect and collaborate with them to acquire new innovations fast and at reduced cost.
  6. Indusface: Indusface Total Application Security (TAS) is industry’s first truly integrated web application security and compliance solution. It helps organizations detect application-layer vulnerabilities accurately with web application scanning (detect), patch them instantly with web application firewall (protect), and monitor traffic continuously for emerging threats and DDoS attacks, to mitigate them (monitor).
  7. In10stech: A comprehensive application development and deployment platform that is being built on modular architecture of OSGI that helps large enterprises improve business agility.
  8. Reverie Inc: Cloud based platform hosted in AWS which enables web and mobile based applications to go multilingual. The platform provides SDKs which comprises of APIs for content localization and transliteration.
  9. Senseforth: Senseforth’s humanlike conversation platform helps enterprises chat with millions of customers simultaneously. Senseforth’s intelligent assistants can address queries, resolve issues, perform tasks and even help customers shop.
  10. Teamchat: Gupshup is a smart messaging platform that offers APIs for developers to build interactive, programmable, omni-channel messaging bots and services as well as SDKs to enable in-app and in-web messaging.
  11. Tone Tag: ToneTag is a product first company driven to realize mobile payments and revolutionize the payment ecosystem with innovative payment products.
  12. Uncanny Vision: UncannyDL provides Vision framework for using Deep Learning models based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). UncannyDL is the 1st Deep Learning-based SDK available for ARM Cortex-A series processors.
  13. Vymo: Google Now’ for enterprise sales teams
  14. Wavemaker: WaveMaker RAD Platform helps enterprises build custom applications quickly, saving money and time on application development and maintenance. WaveMaker can be used to build both responsive web (browser based) as well as Hybrid mobile (smart phone installed Apps).
  15. Yogurt Labs: FLIX is a business-grade video maker mobile app that is easy enough for business of any size to use, yet powerful enough to create cost-effective, professional looking, on-brand videos within few minutes.

Congratulations to all the above winners !!

Watch this space for the announcement of the next batch of 15 winners.

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Brace up all Product Entrepreneurs; InTech50 is back…

InTech50, iSPIRT ’s flagship event is back. The first two editions have been very successful and InTech50 has become the ‘must-go-to’ platform for enterprise CXO’s and product entrepreneurs. Over the past two years, we have hosted CXO’s and business leaders from global companies like AllState, Citibank, HCC Insurance, Standard Chartered, Colgate Palmolive, Time, AirTel, Yes Bank, Exide Life, Mother Diary and the likes. Here are some quick high points from the last two years of InTech50:

  • 18 enterprise deals that got originated and closed from conversations at InTech50
  • 42 enterprise PoC’s offered to InTech50 companies
  • 120+ innovation leaders (read: buyers & influencers) exposed to Indian product entrepreneurs

We have already managed to showcase over a 100 companies, and we have made 50 global investors and CIO’s travel to India to interact and associate with these companies, and happily so.

Here are a few portfolio companies from our past events – Capillary, Uniken, Seclore, Freshdesk, Reverie, Sapience, NowFloats, ToneTag to name a few.

Just to share the impact that we have created, and how these 50 companies have benefitted from this initiative, hear hear what some of them had to say –

“Intech50 is a phenomenal event. It is probably the highest RoI initiative we have ever participated in. With 50+ Global CIOs turning up, it is a great platform to validate your product. Met some of the largest enterprises, found use cases we weren’t aware of and closed marquee deals. Highly recommended!” Yamini Bhat, Vymo.in

“Intech50 was extremely useful in 3 ways. First, making a presentation of just 5 minutes to an extremely discerning audience helped us make our value proposition very crisp. Second, demoing our product to several heads of technology helped validate our product and use cases, and resulted in actual business deals getting signed. And most importantly, we were able to bag a large client with whom we’ve been able to co-create 2 completely new products. I wholeheartedly and highly recommend Intech50 to all B2B startups who have demonstrable products that are ready for large enterprises” – Ranjit Nair, Germin8

“Being a part of InTech50 2015 was a great opportunity for ToneTag. It was exhilarating when ToneTag was selected in the first batch as one of the top 10 products. The event gave us the exposure, guidance and support we needed. InTech50 enabled us to pitch our product to a global panel of curators and the media coverage we received was also been beneficiary to the company. Since winning InTech50, ToneTag has been expanding rapidly. We acquired many leads through the event that led us to PoC’s and commercial deals in the making. The resources we received through InTech50 have been invaluable as it has helped us build exciting partnerships with many in India and around the world” – Kumar Abhishek, ToneTag

If you are a product entrepreneur and your product is solving a problem for the enterprise CXO, InTech50 is your chance to showcase your product to the who’s who in the enterprise buyer community.

Apply before Feb 22nd 2016 and experience a bigger and better InTech50 in 2016.

To know more, click here.

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Announcing the first 25 successful companies attending #PNgrowth

Right. So the first batch of #PNgrowth companies is here. It has been a slog for us going through all the applications we received, and we have made sure that we are extremely fair in the way we are allocating places for our already over-subscribed program.

If you don’t know what this is about, you go here, and if you want to apply, here, better late than never.
                                25-founders-collage-1
We are going to announce the companies finalised as we go along, so they can start preparing for what will possible be a non-stop knowledge ride.
So here we go, the first 25 companies for the inaugural #PNgrowth program
    1. Ahimanikya Satapathy of Docengage,  Healthcare CRM
    2. Akshat Choudary of Blogvault, WordPress backup service
    3. Anand Krushnan of Exclusife, offers app
    4. Ankit Oberoi of Adpushup, online ad optimizer
    5. Arastu Zakia of Collegebol, education/students forum
    6. Ashwin Ramaswamy of ContractIQ,B2B Outsourcing Marketplace
    7. Dhruv Gupta of Valuehire.com, recruitment software
    8. Elvis D’Souza of Sensara, TV search app
    9. Jaineel Agarwal of Planet Superheroes, Superhero merchandise store
    10. Jofin Joseph of Hello Vibe, contact management app
    11. Koushik Shee of Effia Soft , cloud ERP
    12. Krish Subramanian of Chargebee , billing software
    13. Kumar Abhishek of ToneTag, payment app
    14. Laxman Papineni of AppVirality, growth toolkit
    15. Mrigank Tripathi of Qustn, training and assessment company
    16. Nityananda Rao of Actouch Technologies Pvt Ltd, accounting software
    17. Pritesh Vora of Uninstall.io, app analytics provider
    18. Priyanka Agarwal of Wishberry, crowdfunding platform
    19. Rahul Bhalla of Zenatix, energy hardware company
    20. Rohit Bagaria of Budli.in, used gadgets marketplace
    21. Sanjay Sahani of Optimizory, management tool
    22. Shameel Abdulla of Jiffstore, grocery supermarket
    23. Sonal Goyal of NubeTechnologies,data analytics company
    24. Srikanth Adiga of Open Specimen, biobanking informatics
    25. Vijay Mane of Albumizer , album designer
Congratulations to the startups who made it. They will receive further information in their mailboxes.
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Announcing the first batch of 10 companies shortlisted for @InTech50

InTech50 is a flagship event of iSPIRT & Terenne Global. It is a showcase of some of the most promising software products created by entrepreneurs from India.

The top 50 companies that will make it to InTech50 are selected by an eminent panel comprising of Chief Information Officers (CIOs) of marquee companies, VCs, and senior executives from Product companies.

These chosen 50 companies will receive advice, on-going mentoring, product marketing support, and funding to scale their offering to the global markets.

We received over 228 applications (As expected, we had a slew of applications that came in on the last day). Thanks to the efforts of our core team and jury members we have now closed the first leg of InTech50 2015 selection process.

Our eminent jury had a wonderful, but tough time in shortlisting from among the applicants the top 100 that will make it to the next round. According to a jury member – “We were thrilled with the quality of applications we saw. It was an exhilarating experience to see so many good ideas that are tryignt o shape the world for a smarter future.”

The criteria for the first phase of shortlisting were as follows:

  • Products that were already operating in the market were preferred to those at a concept / POC stage
  • Products that addressed horizontal opportunities were preferred over those that focused very deep on a vertical
  • Products that were easy to implement & use were preferred over products that needed deeper integration with enterprise systems (like ERP)
  • Solutions that could be an “add-on”/”bolt-on” to the existing eco-system

Here are the ten shortlist of our first batch(in alphabetical order)

  • Germin8′ Social Intelligence stakeholder insights and engagement platform that collects and analyses conversations in real time from public sources and private sources, and converts them into industry-specific actionable insights and leads.
  • Framebench is the easiest way to view, annotate, discuss and collaborate over any file online. Be it an presentation, a high res image or even a video.
  • Freshdesk is a full-fledged cloud based support software that lets businesses support their customers across email, phone, chat and social media.
  • Indix App and Indix API – They collect, organize, structure and analyze a huge amount of product and product related info so that businesses can use their apps and APIs to improve product search, optimize offers, better target product ads, enrich their catalog and do ad hoc analysis.
  • Qubole Data Service is a self-service platform for big data analytics that runs on the three major public clouds: Amazon AWS, Google Compute Engine and Microsoft Azure. QDS provides platorms like Hadoop, Hive. Spark and Presto as a service along with programming interfaces like SQL, Pig, Cascading, Scala and Python – all through an intuitive user interface that encourages collaboration.
  • Sapience is a patent pending software product that catalyzes a Mindful Enterprise. By combining self-quantification at work for individuals and enterprise effort analytics, Sapience enables data driven decision-making in empowering employees and management towards productivity and wellness.
  • Seclore FileSecure helps enterprise define, control and audit the use of information as it flows within and outside of the enterprise. It allows enterprises to embed security, privacy and compliance policies within information itself.
  • Talview Video Interview platform is reinventing the way screening and selection happens in the industry. They are the second largest player globally in video-mobile recruitment tools augmented with talent engagement and state of the art Hiring Analytic Technology.
  • ToneTag is a patent pending proximity tech that allows easy, frictionless and secure proximity payments using sound (Tone) or NFC (Tag). Depending upon user device and retail pos hardware, mobile application can toggle to initiate in-store purchases using sound or NFC. It works on any mobile device and no internet is required on user device at time of initiating payment.
  • Tydy – The documents we use today were built for the desktop world. Microsoft Office was launched in 1990 and not much has changed since then! PDF, PPT, XLS and others were not built for mobile consumption. Tydy is a new mobile document format. The Tydy doc harnesses the interactivity & sensors of mobile devices to create a completely new document consumption experience.”

According to Piyush Singh, co-host, InTech50, “The shortlisting process was an intellectually stimulating exercise. Am happy to see the escalation in not just the number of applications from last year, but also the quality. Jury members unanimously concurred that the software product eco-system seems to be evolving very well”

We are delighted that InTech50 has emerged as a platform that connects high-potential products to CIOs, investors, Executives from product companies and other stakeholders of the co-system from across the globe. That individuals and organizations from across the world consider InTech50 as the annual event that showcases a well curated and end-user driven platform for “Innovation for a Smarter Future” is encouraging. iSPIRT is committed to work with each of the selected companies to make a difference in their entrepreneurial journey, with support/advise/mentoring/guidance and giving their ventures a thrust as they scale up.

Do follow this space, as we will soon announce the next batch of 10 InTech50 companies. 

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Great Tech Rocketships (GTRS) to the UK – a UKTI, Tech Hub UK and iSPIRT initiative

Great Tech Rocketships to the UK is an initiative by UKTI to assist companies from India that would like to do business in, with or from the UK.

(UKTI, or UK Trade & Investment, is a UK Government department whose mandate is to assist UK based businesses in their overseas expansion, and also encourage the best overseas companies to look to the UK as their global partner of choice.)

UKTI chose TechHub, a London & Bangalore based co-working facility, and iSPIRT as their key partners to implement this program on the ground.

iSPIRT saw this as an ideal platform to encourage and assist Indian software product companies go global. According to Sharad Sharma, “The Rocketships initiative is another significant step forward in the journey to create a product nation here in India. It was a wonderful opportunity to collaborate with TechHub and UKTI to provide a platform for high-potential companies in India to explore global markets.”

GTRS is intended to be a long-term initiative for creating a platform, to assist high-potential companies from India, explore UK as a destination to do business, in, with or from.

The initiative launched was an interesting competition wherein 5 high-potential startups were selected from nearly 300 applicants, and are now on their way for a one-week sponsored tour of the innovation hubs in UK.

The program was launched at a packed event at Tech Hub’s Bangalore centre on the 3rd of Feb. Our call for entries was an application form, with a one-minute video pitch. We connected with a lot of companies – through social media, emails, and even personal phone calls. The response we got was overwhelming. In the last four weeks that we launched and called for entries, we received nearly 300 entries from companies across India. What was most satisfying was that 55 of these companies scored 4 or 5 on a scale of 1 to 5, and 25 companies scored 3, indicating an overall high quality of software product companies across India.

A jury comprising of Sharad Sharma, Mohandas Pai, Stewart Noakes, Dr. Vicky Pope, and Dr. Chris Moore, selected the winners from a list drawn from among the 61 companies that were shortlisted to present at Demo Nights held across 5 cities – Bangalore, Hyderabad, Pune, Chennai and Delhi.

With rigorous effort and comprehensive screening, we are proud to showcase the following 5 companies as the finalists of the first leg of the Great Tech Rocketships to the UK initiative –

  • Frilp – The quickest way to access the local knowledge of your friends and our experts.
  • Agrima Infotech – Development. Design. Online Marketing.
  • Talview – Talview is a pioneer and leader in video based assessments. It has more than 1000 clients across the globe from startups to Fortune 100 and have completed more than a million video responses across 102 countries.
  • Tonetag – ToneTag allows easy, frictionless & secure proximity payments using soundwaves (Tone) or NFC (Tag) and enables Contactless experience on any device
  • Congruent Technologies – Multi-national IT-solutions Corporation, with deep domain expertise in the financial services, healthcare, education and e-retail verticals

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The winners gets –

  • A week-long trip to UK, that includes flights, accommodation
  • Deep-dived interaction with world class investors, incubation hubs and science tech parks
  • Guided tour of Tech City, Europe’s most vibrant innovation hub
  • Network with like-minded entrepreneurs, start-ups, research scholars and pioneering companies

Also, the Founders of each of the shortlisted companies will be further empowered in their endeavor, by way of a year’s membership (Flex) from TechHub, which will enable them to leverage the global network and support system, thereby fast-tracking their journey of going global.

Long-term impact

While these 5 companies were shortlisted as the winners, iSPIRT is committed to guide companies that have the potential & desire to go global, and UKTI is committed to assist in anyway they can in the company’s journey to the UK.

iSPIRT is glad to have developed a strong working relationship with UKTI, Tech Hub, and through them we are now better connected with the entrepreneurial eco-system in UK.

There are several programs and incentives that are available from the UK Government, and UKTI not only can provide you information about these programs but can also assist companies in accessing programs that may be relevant to them.

As iSPIRT, we would love to see Indian software product companies go global. Great Tech Rocketships to the UK is one significant initiative which will help iSPIRT provide deserving companies a facilitated access to UK, thus paving a path for their European and global expansion.

Should you be interested in knowing about opportunities in the UK, or if you are keen on exploring what the opportunities in UK are, drop us a line at gtrs(at)ispirt.in. Wherever relevant, we will be happy to connect you with our contacts at UKTI and Tech Hub.